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This paper reports on the findings of the HEFCE‐funded outcomes project which aimed to investigate strategic planning in UK academic libraries.

The research consisted of a literature and documentation review, followed by interviews with academic library directors and senior institutional managers. There was also a survey of all UK HE libraries.

The key issues which need to be addressed by academic libraries in terms of strategic planning are: the involvement of library staff; communication of library aims and plans externally; level of active involvement in institutional and departmental planning; evaluation and target setting; and involvement in more “difficult” institutional aims such as income generation and widening participation.

The response to the various activities of this research project indicate the lack of interest in outcomes assessment within the academic library sector. There is little rigorous evidence in this area to inform library professionals.

The lack of interest in outcomes assessment with the sector is worrying; there is a general view of libraries as essential part of higher education and do not need to demonstrate how they contribute to institutional aims. This may leave libraries in a vulnerable position.

The paper reports on an issue which should be of great concern to the academic library sector, especially in the light of the proposal to axe professional posts at the University of Wales, Bangor library.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the breadth of the challenges and issues facing institutional repositories in academic libraries, based on a survey of academic librarians. Particularly, this study covers the challenges and barriers related to data management facing institutional repositories.

The study uses a survey method to identify the relative significance of major challenges facing institutional repositories across six dimensions, including: data, metadata, technological requirements, user needs, ethical concerns and administrative challenges.

The results of the survey reveal that academic librarians identify limited resources, including insufficient budget and staff, as the major factor preventing the development and/or deployment of services in institutional repositories. The study also highlights crucial challenges in different dimensions of institutional repositories, including the sheer amount of data, institutional support for metadata creation and the sensitivity of data.

This study is one of a few studies that comprehensively identified the variety of challenges that institutional repositories face in operating academic libraries with a focus on data management in institutional repositories. In this study, 37 types of challenges were identified in six dimensions of institutional repositories. More importantly, the significance of those challenges was assessed from the perspective of academic librarians involved in institutional repository services.

Aims to describe one academic health science center library's experience with expanding reference librarian leadership roles in implementing institutional repository initiatives.

The institutional repository project development phases are briefly documented. The rationale for selecting reference librarians to lead the initiative and resultant role changes is discussed.

Reference librarians are strategically placed to promote and administer institutional repository initiatives successfully. The professional challenge rests in reference librarians' readiness to become scholarly publishing change agents.

This case study documents a successful approach to incorporating institutional repository projects into existing library roles in addition to providing new leadership opportunities for reference librarians.

Reference librarian roles in institutional repository projects and the evolution of organizational roles are not addressed in the heavily technology‐ and marketing‐based institutional repository literature.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the experience of developing a library portal to provide integrated access to research information at the same time as an institutional or enterprise information portal was being implemented.

The paper presents a case study.

Valid grounds for implementing vertical, specialised library portals alongside horizontal institutional portals include reduced risk, faster implementation and reduced maintenance costs.

Organisations seeking to provide integrated access to distributed information resources must consider library portals.

This case study reveals that in practice there is little risk of overlap between institutional and library portals. Both types of product are complementary. However, some integration issues remain a challenge.

This article suggests strategies for the usage of open access institutional repositories (OAIR) at university libraries in Ghana.

Pragmatism paradigm, mixed methods research approach and convergent parallel mixed method design was adopted. Simple random sampling, stratified random sampling, purposive sampling techniques and the sample size converter were the sampling procedures and methods employed. The questionnaire and interview guide were used as research instruments to gather relevant data for the study. Descriptive statistics and inferential statistics were used as statistical tools to analyze quantitative and thematic analysis was used to analyze qualitative data.

Factors such as software, staffing, advocacy, marketing and policies are crucial in the development of OAIR strategy at the University of Ghana.

Information from the National Accreditations Board (NAB) of Ghana (2018) indicates that Ghana has 92 Higher Educational Institutions (HEI). These are categorized into nine national public universities, eight technical universities, ten professional institutions and 65 private universities and university colleges. This article focuses only on five university libraries with the understanding that they were the only universities on the Directory of Open Access Repositories, authoritative international registries of repositories that provide data on the number of registered Institutional Repositories throughout the world.

It is envisaged that the findings will benefit policymakers, academic staff, university library management and librarians. Academic staff will recognize the need to use OAIR. OAIR managers and administrators will be able to determine the factors affecting the usage of OAIR in university libraries and will be able to design strategies on how OAIR can be sustained and managed.

The article suggests strategies for the usage of OAIR that are instrumental for university libraries in Ghana. The strategies consist of an Institutional Guideline that requires adequate marketing, policies, software and staffing. The research also provided an understanding of OAIR through the lenses of technology acceptance model (TAM) an extension of the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) to explain the usage of OAIR in university libraries in Ghana.

This paper proposes indicators for measuring the success of institutional repositories based on their demonstrated integration with other research initiatives and provides a snapshot of the current state of selected institutional repositories in Canada through a review of their web presence and their integration with university library and research pages.

Using the proposed indicators, an examination of the web sites of selected Canadian universities who are participating in the Canadian Association of Research Libraries Institutional Repository project was undertaken.

Institutional repositories are growing in Canada and that the Canadian IR community is on the way to the proposed model future – integration with existing university research practices.

Indicators such as those proposed in the paper can provide a basic framework for evaluating IR projects and highlight areas where the library can generate additional support for these worthwhile projects.

Many libraries are facing the challenges to develop and manage an institutional repository. This paper addresses the issue of content in repositories, and suggests that librarians need to approach the task of content development by applying some of the procedures and skills associated with collection management within more traditional environments. It also considers the types of content that might be suitable for institutional repositories, and notes that several recent Australian reports have recommended the need for a more standardised and regulated approach to the content of institutional repositories. It is argued that this is inappropriate.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the need for academic libraries to demonstrate and increase their impact of student learning and success. It highlights the data problems present in existing library value correlation research and suggests a pathway to surmounting existing data obstacles. The paper advocates the integration of libraries into institutional learning analytics systems to gain access to more granular student learning and success data. It also suggests using library-infused learning analytics data to discover and act upon new linkages that may reveal library value in an institutional context.

The paper describes a pattern pervasive in existing academic library value correlation research and identifies major data obstacles to future research in this vein. The paper advocates learning analytics as one route to access more usable and revealing data. It also acknowledges several challenges to the suggested approach.

This paper describes learning analytics as it may apply to and support correlation research on academic library value. While this paper advocates exploring the integration of library data and institutional data via learning analytics initiatives, it also describes four challenges to this approach including librarian concerns related to the use of individual level data, the tension between claims of correlation and causation in library value research, the need to develop interoperability standards for library data and organizational readiness and learning analytics maturity issues.

This paper outlines a path forward for academic library value research that may otherwise be stymied by existing data difficulties.

The purpose of this paper is to give an overview of the initial transformation of one academic library's digital media library into the institutional repository (IR) of its entire academic organization.

Provides a description of an academic digital library's evolution into an institutional repository, accompanied by both practical and philosophical analyses.

Materials supporting an academic institution's scholarship (from colleges and from supporting organizations on campus) can play an important part in the success of an institutional repository. Standards for metadata content, data structures and hierarchies of collections must be followed consistently, and adequate storage for digital media within an institutional repository is necessary to have in advance of anticipated demand for the smooth operation of the IR and continued access to materials. Gray areas between the role of an institutional repository and the role of that organization's archives need to be addressed in the future.

Academic libraries can be highly successful in producing an institute repository by developing relationships with various organizations on campus in addition to the academic programs. Maintaining standards throughout the IR is crucial to future growth in an organized and consistent manner. Philosophical considerations of the role of the IR should be addressed in the beginning stages of the development of the IR for eliminating confusion and duplication of its contents with other campus organizations.

This paper describes the development of a digital library, created and maintained by an academic library, and its gradual change into a de facto institutional repository. Other libraries in the planning stages or initial steps of creating a campus‐wide digital library or an institutional repository can benefit from the description of possible successes and problems that they could encounter during implementation.